


The Myth of Escape

by Chronicler



Series: Thramsay Pick ’n’ Mix [4]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Altered Mental States, Anal Fisting, Anal Sex, Angst, Bestiality, Blood, Body Horror, Body Image, Body Modification, Boys In Love, British English, Canon Character of Color, Canon Compliant, Canon Disabled Character, Canon Queer Character, Caring, Character Study, Class Issues, Crucifixion, Cutting, Declarations Of Love, Disfigurement, Dogs, Dom/sub, Dragons, Dysfunctional Family, Dysfunctional Relationships, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Endearments, Escape, F/F, Family, Fate & Destiny, Fisting, Gender Issues, Genderfuck, Hate to Love, Horror, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Torture, Kinda, Knotting, Loss of Identity, Love Confessions, M/M, Master/Slave, Mental Anguish, Mental Breakdown, Mental Coercion, Mental Disintegration, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Military, Moving On, Mutilation, Non-explicit Genital Mutilation, Not as porny as it sounds, Obsession, One True Pairing, Or not, Pansexual Character, Past Abuse, Past Torture, Pet Names, Physical Abuse, Poor Reek, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Drama, Psychological Horror, Psychological Torture, Psychological Trauma, Psychopathology & Sociopathy, Psychopaths In Love, Queer Themes, Ramsay is his own warning, Rape, Rape Aftermath, Rape Recovery, Rape/Non-con Elements, Sailing, Sea Monsters, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Self-Mutilation, Sexual Slavery, Sibling Love, Slavery, Soldiers, Stockholm Syndrome, Supernatural Elements, Survival Horror, Tainted Love, Tentacle Monsters, Tentacle Sex, Tentacles, Torture, Twisted, Verbal Abuse, Verbal Humiliation, armour kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2016-11-21
Packaged: 2018-08-31 08:16:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8571136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chronicler/pseuds/Chronicler
Summary: Theon Greyjoy has fled from his captor, Lord Ramsay Bolton.But has he really escaped?In Meereen with his sister, Yara, Theon struggles with a past that refuses to be left behind.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I experimented with flashbacks, time shifts, tenses and ambiguity. Plus it's about my PTSD, self harming, etc. I put some of my own life into this, which yes is disturbing. The kinks are for someone else. I wanted to write Tyrion because I'm disabled and he's an important disabled character. There should be more slash about him, I'm just too into Thramsay. I hope I fixed all the tenses and pronouns? I'm still finding errant "he's" in Nor Iron Bars a Cage.
> 
> Please try and read it on something that shows italics or it won't make much sense, preferably with my work skin on.
> 
> Thanks to Matty for beta reading.
> 
> Feedback gratefully received. Please read the tags for warnings.

~~~

_‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ L.P. Hartley_

_~~~_

‘Have you heard?’ Yara calls, bursting into Theon’s quarters.

Mutilated hands shaking, he pulls his undershirt closed. ‘You – you could knock,’ he says, looking steadfastly down at the cracked terracotta tiles of the floor, back hunched over as he trembles. ‘I was – was dressing.’

She pauses, staring at his chest. She must have seen, seen the scars criss-crossing every inch of it, the mangled flesh where his right nipple used to be.

She’d washed his hair after he’d escaped from his lord and come home to her, shaved him – his own hands shook too badly. Whispered, ‘It’ll be alright, little brother.’ He hadn’t even known she could whisper, so used to hearing her bark orders. But he hadn’t let her see him naked. Hadn’t let her bathe him. Hadn’t let her touch him anywhere intimate. No one could do that but his master. His lord. His –

‘Are you even listening to me, Theon?’

Lips clamped shut he nods, looking back at the ground.

She sighs. ‘I said he’s dead! The bastard, he’s _dead_. I only wish I could have done it myself – _slowly_. Everyone at the docks in Dragons Bay was talking about it, rumours are spreading like wildfire. They say he went to war against that other bastard, Jon Snow; that it was twenty thousand on each side, and a whole flank of giants; that Sansa Stark rode into battle at the head of Jon’s army – like an avenging wight or something, raised from the dead; that she and Jon cut him up while he was still alive and fed him, piece by piece, to his hounds. They say that –’

And as she speaks her words creep over Reek like a blade sawing him through, till they fade away and all he can hear is the roar in his ears.

‘ _No – no – no –_ ’ he hears someone say an ocean away, before he realises it’s his own voice, and hands grasp his arms and shake him.

‘Theon! For fuck’s sake, Lord Bolton’s dead! Ramsay is _dead!_ And his father’s dead, his baby brother is dead, the whole fucking rats nest is _dead_. I know you were still watching over your shoulder, still thinking he’d find you, but –’

She fades away again.

All he can hear are the old words in his master’s voice.

_‘How long will you be Reek?’_

_‘Always. Forever. Till I’m rotting in the ground.’_

_‘Good boy. Such a good boy for me.’_

_And Ramsay grinned, eyes lit with the fire of madness and a dagger grasped in his hand. But that hadn’t mattered, all that mattered was pleasing him, keeping him happy, making him –_

‘Theon! For fucks sake, stay with me.’

And the room solidifies again around him as his sister’s words reach him from so far away.

‘I hate it when you do that, disappear into yourself,’ she says, pulling him to the thin cot and shoving him down to sit on it. ‘It’s like he still has you, but he _doesn’t_. You understand that, don’t you? We’re in Meereen and no one will ever take you again.’

And Theon just nods. There’s always someone to please.

~~~

‘Grey Worm, what it is like to suddenly have no master?’ Tyrion Lannister asks, a goblet clasped in his hand and his eyes sparkling at Theon. Sitting along the carved bench Tyrion is, briefly, the same height as the men lined up beside him.

Ruined hands clasped in his lap, Theon looks down at the table, studies the knots in the polished wood between the plates of fruits and olives and meats. Food he's no longer accustomed to and can’t quite believe, couldn't face chewing now anyway with the fleshy gaps between his remaining teeth.

‘It is,’ Grey Worm answers after a long pause, in a voice lacking inflection, ‘hard to explain.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Tyrion says from the end of the long table, ‘but help out our _friend_ here.’ He gestures to Theon, wine sloshing onto wood. ‘You were a slave, as he became, how does it feel to finally be _free_? For one’s master’s to finally be _dead_?’

‘I do not think a lord can understand how it feels.’

‘Perhaps you are right. Although, Theon here is, I suppose, _technically_ a lord. Last male Greyjoy, heir to the Iron Islands – for whatever that's worth: last I heard it was a barren wasteland of shoals and shipwrecks. So tell me then, one man to another: what is it like to have no _cock?_ ’

Theon stumbles to his feet, wine spilling ruby red as blood. He cringes – his master would have taken a finger for carelessness such as that.

_‘Does it feel like you have a phantom cock?’ Ramsay asked him yet again._

_Reek was back on the cross in the dungeon, always ended up back there. Nailed to it that time, tearing through his hands and feet, his master’s fingers pressed against his chest, almost a caress._

_‘I asked you a question, Reek. You wouldn’t want to make me angry?’_

_And, words stumbling over themselves, he promised his lord that ‘N–no,’ he felt nothing, that, ‘I’m n–not a man!’_

And he stumbles over his words again in the great hall, ‘Do I – Do I –’ _have permission to leave, my lord?_

But he glances up, sees rows of eyes staring at him. The brown eyes of warriors, tanned skin scarred like his own.

No – not like his own.

He wasn’t scarred in battle.

 _What is your name?_ His master’s words as clear as the sunlight streaming through the intricately carved wrought iron covering the windows.

‘ _Reek, Reek_ ,’ he mutters as he turns and hobbles out the massive doors.

~~~

_‘Do you love me Reek?’_

_‘Of course, my lord.’_

_And his master grinned, the vicious grin that shone out of him, eyes ablaze with it. It took Theon’s breath away._

_And his master hard inside of him, hands on his throat, teeth and nails and the warmth running over him of his own blood._

_A blade glided over his skin as smooth as a raven soaring through the air –_

A blade hacks at his arm as rough as an axe felling a tree –

_A blade caressed his skin, as consuming as his master’s touch –_

A blade rips him open –

_A blade held by his master, blunt fingers dripping with blood, but Reek knew –_

‘Theon! Theon, for fuck’s sake, what –’ and hands are on him, the straight razor ripped from his few clumsy fingers.

‘Tyrion?’ Theon asks when his vision focusses, finding himself sitting on the hard edge of his cot.

Standing in front of Theon, Tyrion is his height, taking him in with level green eyes that always see far too much. He’s wrapping a torn strip of white cloth around Theon’s arm. Crimson inches along the fibres.

‘–  and this isn’t how I wanted to spend my evening. Meereen has a passable vineyard I was planning to visit, sample what they hoard in their cellars,’ Tyrion is saying while he binds Theon’s arm. ‘I will never understand why the victimised take over and abuse themselves once they’re free. Not that you didn’t deserve everything you got of course, but still.’

‘Why are you here?’ Theon asks, hunching over and letting himself be tended to. A studied passivity. His sister had insisted he be given his own room, given privacy, not bunked in the barracks with the Unsullied and Dothraki hordes.

Tyrion inclines his head towards the door. Beside it stands a dusty, intricately blown bottle of wine, claret as red as the drops of blood surrounding it. ‘Peace offering. Daenerys wants us to work together, and she may have… encouraged me to come and talk to you after she heard what happened.’

‘You’re afraid of her?’

‘I have a healthy respect for our queen. And her dragons. Her very large, fire-breathing dragons.’

‘There are worse monsters than dragons.’

‘Indeed there are. It’s the first time I’ve seen you without your gloves since you arrived…’

Theon curls his hands into fists, hiding the jagged red stumps of his missing fingers.

_‘You know why I do this?’ Ramsay asked, slicing Reek’s finger right down to the bone._

_He tried not to scream, but it bubbled up out of him._

_‘Do. You. Know. Why?’ Ramsay asked again, eyes wide, wild, Reek’s head grasped between his hands._

_‘So I know who–who I belong to.’_

_And that grin again as Ramsay nodded._

_‘Please, my–my lord, please, please, please –’_

_‘Please stop or please take it away?’_

_Reek sobbed. ‘Take it.’_

‘Take it – take it,’ Theon mutters.

‘What?’ Tyrion asks, as the small room bleeds back into focus.

‘Nothing,’ Theon mumbles, rocking back and forth.

With a sigh, Tyrion ties the final knot and stands back. ‘That’s the best I can do. Your sister will be back this evening, she can patch you up. Missandei said she’s off helping prepare the ships for the voyage to Westeros.’

Theon pulls into himself even further, body curling, constricting.

‘Or not: you can do it yourself for all I care,’ Tyrion adds. Again, he sighs. ‘Look, I perhaps should not have said what I did. Grey Worm is giving me the silent treatment – I think, although it is, admittedly, hard to tell. You used to be such a cocky little cunt though, back when you thought a dwarf was the funniest thing in all seven kingdoms. But you should talk to him, and the other Unsullied. They’re all castrated – root and stem, rumour says. And Varys when he returns. He doesn’t have a cock either – hacked off when he was a child. And yet they all seem to manage. Somehow.’

_‘Aren’t you glad I took your cock?’ Ramsay asked behind Reek, wrist deep inside him, down on their knees on the floor._

_Reek couldn’t speak, wasn’t meant to, just scrabbled at the cold stone beneath him with his remaining fingers, torn nails wet with blood._

_‘Tell me how good it feels, Reek, or I’ll stop.’_

_Just say whatever he wants you to say, Reek told himself, even as his master’s knuckles racked over something inside him and Reek’s remaining toes curled as he babbled into the ground, ‘G–good – feels good, feels –’_

When Theon wakes he’s alone on his cot in the tiny room in the bowels of the great pyramid, cheeks and pillow wet and the bottle still beside the door.

~~~

‘ _Heave!_ ’ the foreman shouts, men under his command straining with ropes and pulleys. He’s another of the Unsullied army really, their black armour plating them like ants, but Theon doesn’t know what ranks they use. His sister weaves around the docks, a flash of moulded bronze, giving orders, establishing her command over the fleet.

‘Grey Worm may lead the troops on land, and Daenerys can have the whole fucking world if she wants it,’ his sister had told him the night before, ‘but at sea _I’m_ in command. I wouldn’t mind fucking the tits off her though, I’ve never had a queen before.’

And now, stern, she moves amongst them, her petite form and mousy brown hair going unnoticed against the force of her presence, as weapons and supplies are loaded onto the massive wooden vessels.

Through the teeming mass, Tyrion looks up at the silvery pale queen whilst they plot, plan. Occasionally he glances over at Theon, his glares softened to a pity that may be even worse. And, standing on the wooden planks with the smell of brine and whoosh of waves heavy in the air, theon straightens his hunched-over back as much as he can, tries to look commanding. Tries to look like a proper person. Like a man. Tries to fake it while he waits to be told what to do.

_‘Reek, it rhymes with weak.’ Ramsay said, smiling at his own joke. He never tired of listing all the pet names he had for Reek, his sing-song voice that of a sadistic child. ‘Freak, meek, leak, shriek –’_

‘Theon!’ his sister calls. ‘Don’t just stand there like a useless lump! Help load the ships!’

And he tries to fake it, gives orders to strong men, muscled and tanned beside his thin parlour, his sandy hair beginning to prematurely grey and eyes as watery blue as the sea.

‘Yes, _sir_ ,’ one of them says with a look of contempt, like he knows, knows what Theon really is, all he’s done. The soldier answered in the Common Tongue, but mutters in Valyrian as his broad back disappears into the crowd. Theon doesn't understand the words, but he can guess, guess the names he's being called: coward, harlot, pervert.

_‘I have a special treat for you today,’ Ramsay said. Smiling, arms spread wide. So benevolent._

_He led Reek out to the kennels._

_‘You know I would never hurt you, Reek. Do you want to make me happy?’_

_‘Of course, my lord,’ Reek answered, straining towards his master._

_And his master smiled wider._

_And, amongst the howls and laughter, he found himself down on all fours with the hot breath of a hound on his neck as it scrabbled on his back. As his master guided it inside._

_Reek gasped in a breath, ‘Hurts,’ he mumbled into the hay strewn over the cobblestones, as the powerful black beast rutted into him._

_After what felt like forever, it climbed off, still inside him as it turned away, its knot a hard lump forced into Reek’s guts._

_‘Can you feel it filling you up?’ Ramsay asked, still the only presence Reek could truly feel, even as hot spurts pulsed inside him._

_And, hand pressed to Reek’s belly, Ramsay laughed above him, laughed as he said, ‘You’re not even human anymore. Look at you, just a good little bitch being bred, taking it.’_

_And Reek did take it, took as many of the pack as he could before he collapsed, mouth full of dirt and the stink of dog added to his own filth, lank hair falling over his face and blood on his thighs. They licked at him until his master held them back, yelled commands, didn’t let them end him, didn’t let –_

‘For fuck’s sake, Theon,’ Yara hisses, and picks up the apples scattered around his feet from the crate he was trying to load and had forgotten he was holding. The past drowning out the present. ‘Just jump in the fucking sea and drown if you’re going to embarrass me.’

Hands trembling, he gathers the rest together, and climbs the gangplank, springy under his feet.

‘ _I made you get off on being raped.’_

His master’s voice loud with each step.

_‘My lamb, will you stop whining if I take your tongue?’_

The bustle around him continues as though they can’t hear the words, even though they must, how can they not?

_‘Never forget your name, Reek, and who you belong to.’_

~~~

The view out the porthole surges and calms, surges and calms, surges and calms. But it's comforting, being back at sea. Theon had once thought he never would be again.

_‘You’re not a sailor anymore,’ his master said when he caught Reek looking out the Dreadfort’s window at the Weeping Water that edged the valley. ‘You’re just a thing, an it, stinking of your own waste. Do you remember the kraken on your breastplate, on your banners? Proud creatures, the kraken, rule the sea. But on dry land? They collapse into a heap of jelly. Remember? What use would they be to you now anyway? You’d only want those long, slippery tentacles inside your holes: your mouth, your arse, the slit you piss through like a woman. Filling you up. That’s all you’re good for now. My pretty little whore.’ And he’d grabbed Reek by the hair and dragged him down to the dungeons. Laughed as he made Reek forget._

And Theon shudders as he watches the moonlight glint over the waves outside the circular hole. Because he will never forget now, not any of it.

The sea had been as grey as his master’s cold eyes, but is now black as they had looked when he came for Reek at night. His hair black too, his skin pale, a savage statue hacked from stone but still handsome. Solid and stocky, but surely nowhere near as big, as all-consuming as Theon remembers him. And only Theon's age _–_ not yet thirty Yara claims, even though he feels ancient as the Lonely Hills. He keeps telling himself that Ramsay was just a man, a mortal. He almost believes it.

‘We’ll go home, little brother, take back what’s ours,’ Yara had said up on the deck of their ship that afternoon, the sun glaring overhead as they led the fleet. Though a dragon was carved at the helm, not a kraken, and dragons swooped overhead, their rumbling growls filling the air as sunlight glinted off scales.

‘There’s no way back,’ he’d wanted to say. ‘I can pretend to be Theon, but I’m Reek, will always be Reek.’ But he hadn’t. Jaw clenched, the lines of his cheekbones stark above hollows, he had stood by her side, tried to be strong, tried to be comforting in his silence.

Somehow his sister had commandeered him his own cabin again so he wouldn’t have to undress in front of anyone. They wouldn’t have smiled with unbridled joy at his scars and mutilations the way his master had.

Too heavy, as thin as he is now, too weary, he sits on the narrow bed carved into the wood surrounding him. He has a straight razor clasped in his hand. Like the one he used to shave his master, darkly stubbled throat bared to him. But this razor is blood encrusted, rust edging the blade, the handle carved from driftwood. It had been his father’s, left in the castle when he died. Balon Greyjoy, just a forgotten ruin lost in the past like his son.

_‘A painted pansy,’ his father called him, ‘a sodomite. Prancing around in your dresses. That’s all you are. No use to anyone. I wish my real sons had survived. But all I have is a daughter, and you, less than a woman.’_

Yes, yes even less than a woman, the words sink down into his bones as he flexes his arm, skin tightening, drags the blade across the back of his hand, his wrist. For a moment nothing happens, and he does it again and again, before the flesh from the first cuts finally parts and he sees the damage done, but doesn't stop.

_‘Must you bring that thing in here when we eat?’ Roose Bolton said in the Dreadfort’s great hall. ‘He smells foul.’_

_‘He has to live up to the name I gave him, Father. Don’t you, Reek? And make himself useful. A servant.’ And Ramsay smiled, teeth glinting in the muted half-light forcing its way through the windows over the banquet table and flickering from the candles._

_He’s a shark, a shark circling for blood, Reek thought as he filled goblets with wine from a flagon, hands shaking. But I can be useful, I can be a good servant and live in the cellars with the others, not the kennels. I can be a –_

_But as he poured the blood-red wine for Ramsay a hand landed on his arse, caressing, fingers pushing at the thin, patched cotton over his hole._

_‘You’ll do anything I tell you, won’t you Reek?’ Ramsay said, looking up at him. A shark waiting to attack._

_‘Yes – yes my lord.’_

_And he would._

Theon’s discarded armour lays scattered over the wooden planks of the floor, as if anything could protect him. As if anything could protect anyone. And blood drips down to join it.

_‘Don’t forget what Theon is,’ Ned Stark said to Robb, and Theon froze, crept back around the corner. They hadn’t seen him, kept talking. Still a child, he flattened himself to the wall in the wide hallways of Winterfell. Barely dared breathe while he listened. ‘In the end, he’s a hostage here.’_

_‘Father – he’s my friend. And Theon’s harmless, he just wants to be part of the family, he just wants –’_

_‘You’re not a child anymore,’ Ned said to the boy who had just turned twelve, ‘you need to understand how things work. Yes he’s a nice boy, yes he’s your friend. But he isn’t one of us, and one day he’ll turn on us like his father. Keep him close, but remember our position. We have to make hard choices. One day you may have to strike him down. I wish I could protect you from how things are, but I can’t. Our strength comes from doing what has to be done. From –’_

_Theon straightened his back and pushed his chest out, harsh as he scrubbed at his cheeks with the heels of his hands and headed back to his bedchamber._

Theon pulls off his shirt. Stained scarlet, it crumples into a heap on the floor.

He pulls the blade across the length of his chest, and relief floods him as his skin parts, flesh pale as uncooked chicken, long seconds before the blood comes.

_‘You think you’re better than me?’ Ramsay asked. ‘Child killer, traitor, cheap whore even before I had you.’_

_‘No,’ Reek answered and knew it to be true, as Ramsay pulled off his rags and pushed him towards the bed._

_It was the only time Reek got to be somewhere warm and soft. Fucking him like the woman he'd turned him into, Ramsay called it, when he climbed on top of Reek and pushed his thighs apart. Like when Reek watched Ramsay fuck the kennel master’s daughter, and Sansa, and the girls from the village, and…_

_‘They’re just meat,’ Ramsay would tell him. ‘Rotten, stinking, meat. Like you. But you're the one I'll keep and never let go. My creation. Tell me I'm your god and I won't take any more of your bits.’_

The blade veers off as Theon twitches, cutting a jagged line across his arm.

‘Shit,’ he mutters, his flesh falling open, red and splodges of black showing through. There’s probably a maester on board who can stitch him up, or whatever their equivalent is in Meereen.

But why go back when he can go forward?

He keeps going, slicing, slicing, slicing.

_‘I escaped,’ he told his sister, when he made it back to Pyke._

But had he? He isn’t sure.

Maybe he’s still at the Dreadfort, kneeling at his master’s feet.

Maybe this is all a dream.

His left hand lays immobile in his lap, tendons sawed through, his right trembling as he clenches the razor.

_‘Slit his throat,’ Roose Bolton said, looking at Reek as though he were nothing. ‘It would be better for all of us, especially this wretched creature.’_

_He stormed away, Ramsay scowling at his back._

_‘Fucking cunt. He still sees me as a bastard, even after he had me naturalised. One day I’ll stick a knife in his guts, do a fucking better job running this place than he ever did. And you shall be my consort, and everyone will hear how you scream when I flay and fuck you. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, my sweet?’_

And by the Drowned God, the emptiness seizes him, the nothingness that aches between his legs. ‘I miss you, my lord’ he whispers, admitting the terrible truth no one can ever know and hiccupping in a breath.

Everywhere is red and red and red, the lantern swaying overhead pouring a flickering yellow light over the room with the low smell of burning oil.

Then darkness. Darkness as Theon slides to the floor. Not even the light of the moon.

The heat snuffs out, air chill as snow, prickling at his frigid skin.

A pale white flickering glow falls across the floor.

And boots, a pair of fine black suede boots before him.

Theon looks up, up, up to the grin of his master looming over him, cold grey eyes glowing as icy blue as a wight’s in stories he heard as a child. The ghosts of ragged bites, rips, tears, ripple incandescent red over pallid skin.

_‘You didn’t really think I’d let you get away, did you, Reek?’_

_‘No – no, never my lord – I waited and waited – I –’_

_‘Shhh, pet. Come to your master.’_

_A cold, skeletal hand closes over Reek’s and takes the blade. In relief he sighs into the blinding darkness that sweeps over him till he drowns._

**_The End_**


End file.
